Emile M. Cioran Quotes
There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.
Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' —That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.
You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.
Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.
The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.
The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.
Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?
The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.
Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.
Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.
I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.
Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.
The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.
Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.
In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
The curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing now but mask and ghost.
History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.
How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.
No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
To live... in any sense of the word... is to reject others; to accept them, one must renounce, do oneself violence.
It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to the false
I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.
Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.
No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.
We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person
Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.
Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor and revolt, a perplexity on fire.